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 Friday, April 28, 2006
Farewell and Good Luck, Cristina/Maggie Gallagher
Sorry Cristina you found this such an unpleasant experience. It seems to me it was not an especially good experience for anyone, although readers may disagree. (You guys are why we run this site). I am also sorry you think my posts represented "biased information." It's a charge I would normally take pretty seriously, as I distinguish pretty hard between opinions or conclusions and evidence. (Which ones were biased exactly? The survey of contraceptive failure rates published in the Alan Gutmacher Institute's journal Family Planning Perspectives? Washington Post and Associated Press accounts of Bearman and Bruckner? The data on NFP failure rates from the Georgtown Institute for Reproductive Health actually substantiated both your and Jennier's claims (i.e. a perfect use rate that is quite low and a typical user failure rate of around 20 percent or so.) My intent was to post reliable sources and let readers interpret the information, which is why I said so little about them. But everyone is entitled to their opinion, including your opinion about me. Thank you for sharing yours about a wide range of things. Best of luck to you in your future ventures. posted by maggie at 6:38 PM | link 
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"I am also sorry you think my posts represented "biased information." It's a charge I would normally take pretty seriously, as I distinguish pretty hard between opinions or conclusions and evidence."
I'm sure you do distinguish between facts and evidence, but this is no defence to the charge levelled. It's perfectly possible to inject considerable bias with nothing but objective facts - much depends on the selection. One conspicuous example was your post contrasting natural methods with the diaphragm. All perfectly valid data, but rather tendentious considering that the diaphragm is (a) not even close to the most reliable method (non-natural or otherwise) and (b) almost extinct, precisely because it doesn't work very well. ("The proportion of all users relying on the diaphragm declined from 6% in 1988 to 2% in 1995, and to nearly zero by 2002." - http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_contr_use.html ) _Logically_ of course, nothing is implied, but _rhetorically_ you couldn't be less subtle.
Well, that's a fair point Mark. But of course I had just posted a chart with the contraceptive failure rates of all methods too.
Nothing I posted, not those facts, nor the fact that NFP works fairly well for dedicated users (and fails alot for typical users) (or that virginity pledges had some documented effects) really addresses in any direct way the proposition that contraception is bad for society, and I never imagined it did.
No reason for people to leave my page with inaccurate information as a driveby casualty of crossfire debate.
The contraceptive failure rate is a bugaboo of mine. Because you know I lived through the sexual revolution. And a lot of girls got pregnant. Including me. Certainly contraceptives prevent a lot of pregnancies. But girls and women do keep getting pregnant. Pretty regularly. Sex can do that.
Seems like an important fact to me. I went to Yale and visited a lot of Planned Parenthood clinics. Nobody ever explained to me what the typical user failure rates were. (its considered discouraging to share these facts with young women). Nor what the theoretical success rates mean in real terms, over the long run. People can do what they want with this info, but they should have it.
My posts certainly reflect my interests which are of course much closer to Jennifer than Cristina's.
But if I were taking a side in a public debate that probably 95 percent of Americans agree with me on, and probably 85 percent don't even consider remotely debatable, I wouldn't feel so bad even if it were two against one.
Believe me, I did try to restrain myself! Live and learn.
Maggie
I think Christina's complaint is quite fair. Posting contraceptive information with your own goal of pointing out they aren't 100% effective totally twisted the debate in the favor of the person you already agreed with. Seems intellectually dishonest all around.
The claim that it was "unfair to Cristina" is different from that the "information was biased."
It turns out I can't just turn over my website to two people, when they touch on matters I care about and know about. I probably shouldn't have tried, or made it clear to Cristina that I would be commenting too.
I've never done this before. As I said live and learn.
I think the allegation of "bias" is that you used the statistics in a biased way, to bolster your particular point of view that supported Jennifer. You use staistics and data all the time to make a particulat point, which is fine, but there's nothing magically "neutral" about statistics when making a "biased, opiinionated" point.
It doesn't "twist" the argument. It is not intellectually dishonest. It was informative. It added to the debate. It was something to be discussed in the comment section.
The topic was addressed with these stats and with the invitation to discuss the evidence.
No foul, as far as the contribution made by the host of this brief debate.
Nobody ever explained to me what the typical user failure rates were. (its considered discouraging to share these facts with young women). Nor what the theoretical success rates mean in real terms, over the long run.
I'm about the same age as you, and went to a similarly good school(Stanford, class of 1982). I actually had an easy time finding the typical use failure rates (as well as the ideal ones). My mother had a copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves, on a readily accessible shelf, in which I looked that information up. We also got both typical and ideal use failure rates for a variety of contraceptives in my high school sex education (but no discussion of contraceptives at all in sex ed until sophomore year of high school - any kids who lost their virginity before about the age of 16 had better have learned about that stuff elsewhere).
What the theoretical success rates meant in real terms, in the long run, we didn't get. It wasn't hard for me to figure out (I did, after all, learn basic statistics), but people aren't always intuitively good at assessing risks, and I often had the feeling that my peers, especially the guys, were underestimating those long term odds, and didn't have a good understanding of why I should still see pregnancy as a big factor in my decisions about sex.
On the other hand, the number of unplanned pregnancies you can expect, over the course of several decades, if you are using contraceptives has to be weighed against the really large number of pregnancies you can expect if you have the same amount of sex and use no method of family planning at all.
The calculation also works out differently if you're looking at condoms in their role of prevention of STDs, because there herd immunity kicks in, so that if (to pull a number out of the air) condoms are 95% effective at preventing disease X, and nearly everyone uses them, you get much better than 95% reduction in the incidence of disease X. This makes any consequentialist argument involving STDs a relatively weak argument for avoiding premarital sex (weaker, even in a time of reliable contraceptives, than pregnancy, for example).
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